‘So it all worked pretty well,’ said Mary.
Leo was lying beside her in Mary’s bed. There was a red velour headboard with recessed lights and a built-in radio and CD player. The food of love flooded from the widely-spaced speakers.
‘Frank finally picked up on the many hints we dropped,’ she said, ‘had you followed and saw what you were doing in the kitchen. Perfect.’
‘If you say so,’ said Leo. ‘I guess.’
In fact he guessed quite differently. He didn’t think the situation was perfect at all. He had done what Mary had told him to do, and as far as he could see he was now in some danger of being, at best, out of a job, or, at worst, in jail.
‘And did they buy all the stuff about you giving of yourself, all the religious and artistic bit?’
‘I wouldn’t say they bought it exactly,’ Leo replied. ‘They seemed to believe I meant what I was saying, but they also thought I was crazy.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Mary.
‘It’s fine for you.’
‘No, it’s fine for you too, Leo. Really.’
‘The only good thing about this,’ said Leo, ‘is that at least your husband doesn’t think we’re having an affair.’
‘That’s what I would call a failure of imagination,’ said Mary. ‘Frank can only take one revelation on board at a time. He knew you were up to something but he didn’t know what. The idea that you might be up to two things at the same time didn’t occur to him. Poor Frank.’
Leo buried his face in Mary’s soft, sun-bedded breasts. They moulded themselves around his cheeks. It felt safe and homely there.
‘I’m glad he didn’t find out,’ said Leo. ‘I wouldn’t want to have to give this up.’
‘We all have to give up everything in the end,’ said Mary.
Leo didn’t know what she meant. He said, ‘The real thing I hate is that everyone assumes I did it because I’ve got something against Frank. Especially he thinks that. Like I was committing an act of revenge.’
‘No, Leo, it was my act of revenge.’
‘I like you, Mrs Marcel. But I like Frank too. I wish I knew why we were doing this. I wish I knew what we were doing.’
Mary said, ‘I don’t see why anybody would object to eating semen. They’re prepared to eat liver and brains and kidneys. All kidneys do is filter piss all day. And what the hell do they think they’re getting when they eat a hamburger or a hotdog?’
‘They prefer not to think about it,’ said Leo.
‘Well maybe they should think about it. If they really thought about it I can’t see that they’d object to eating your sperm. Fortunately, Frank did object. And now he’s gone to England in search of Virgil, which is just what we wanted.’
Leo wondered who the ‘we’ was. He felt sure it didn’t include him. He had this recurring problem with Mary. She was a great looking older woman and he liked her and she appeared to like him, and they were really good in bed together, but he didn’t understand half of what she said to him. And he certainly didn’t understand why she’d asked him to masturbate into the food at Trimalchio’s and make sure that Frank caught him in the act. He knew she had a taste for intrigue but that didn’t really explain anything. Nor did he exactly understand why he’d agreed to do it. It was just that when Mary Marcel asked you to do a thing you did it. She was that kind of woman. Leo had always wanted that kind of woman.
‘Why do you want revenge on your husband?’ he asked. ‘Mr Marcel has always seemed okay to me. What’s wrong with him?’
‘If you want to know what’s wrong with Frank take a look at Virgil. He’s the son and heir. It wasn’t easy to produce a dumb, spoiled, arrogant little shit like Virgil, but Frank managed it. Is it any wonder I hate the bastard?’
Leo wanted to ask which bastard, Virgil or Frank, but thought it wiser not to. Instead he said, ‘I don’t think you should hate anybody.’
‘Okay, maybe I don’t exactly hate Frank,’ said Mary, ‘but you know, when you and I sat in the Golden Boy together, in that little temple built in Frank’s image, with an icon of my son on the roof, and knowing that before long we’d be naked together in bed, hot and sweaty and dirty, well, that felt very good, Leo. That felt like a very satisfactory act of defilement.’
Leo looked blank.
Mary continued, ‘And I can’t stand the way Frank takes credit for the Golden Boy concept. Who produced the kid? Who ran and got the camera? Who took the photograph? You know I did. And what’s more I don’t even think it’s that hot a concept. I know I have a lot to answer for.’
‘Behind every successful man,’ said Leo.
Mary might once have been happy to believe she was the power behind Frank’s throne, but she found that a difficult belief to sustain. All she’d really done was take a photograph. She had certainly married him believing that one day he might be successful and rich, but she supposed all wives believed that about their husbands. Primarily she married him because (it sounded ludicrous now) he had seemed exotic, different, American. He was not the sort of man she was used to meeting in Dartford.
It was 1961. She was twenty-three years old, still living at home with her mother and stepfather, working in a dead-end job as a shop assistant in a department store in Oxford Street. She still had boyfriends but she never met anybody she thought was good enough for her, nobody who was offering her enough. Her girlish dreams were starting to look precisely that; girlish. She was saving herself, but as her mother told her, you could value yourself too highly. You could wait too long for somebody who wasn’t on his way, who didn’t exist. You could end p on the shelf if you priced yourself at more than the going rate.
She met Frank while she was working in the department store. He was a customer, buying presents to take home to America. He wanted a sweater for his Dad who wasn’t in very good health, and a silk square for his Mom. He needed advice and Mary was the shopgirl he approached. She thought he was trying to pick her up. She hoped so.
Frank was not the best-looking man she’d ever known, but he dressed well in thin, elegant black suits. He held his cigarette in an authentic movie actor sort of way that she found sexy. But it was probably the voice, the slow, deep, strong American accent, that convinced her she would marry him.
He never pretended to be anything he wasn’t. He said he’d been drifting around, doing nothing much, ‘looking for something’. It sounded romantic. He’d been to Paris, to Madrid. He’d loved it all, he said, but he loved London best of all, and he was sorry his time had run out and he had to get back to the States. He never pretended to be rich, but she knew that all Americans were rich by her standards. Anybody who could travel round Europe ‘looking for something’ wasn’t exactly penniless, and anyone whose father owned a restaurant surely wasn’t poor.
She only had a few days to convince him to marry her and take her back with him to California. She had to persuade him that she was the something he’d been looking for. She couldn’t believe how easy he was to persuade. He wanted desperately to be persuaded. It would feel good to arrive home with his new English bride and show her off to his parents and family. His mother wanted him to be settled. This way he could be settled yet still keep a hint of romance in the shape of his foreign wife, his souvenir of England. Frank and Mary revelled briefly in each other’s foreignness and imagined exoticism.
If Mary was soon disappointed by Frank and California, she still thought it was a whole lot better than staying in Dartford. She never once thought of going home to mother. Drive-ins and Chevies and barbecues may have been mundane once you got used to them, but they were still preferable to the Odeons, Morris Minors and fry-ups of home. Then Virgil was born.
She had never liked babies much. They were too demanding, too much trouble. She thought it might all be different with her own child but it proved not to be. She loved Virgil, she supposed, and she would do her duty by him, but she couldn’t find him so very fascinating or likeable. She didn’t see how women could make a whole life out of having babies and being a mother. She made absolutely sure that she never had another child.
Mary survived. She was never going to be exactly thrilled at spending her life as the wife of the son of the guy who owned the local diner. It was not what she had wanted or imagined, but she would stick it out. She was not a quitter.
When Frank’s father died it was almost as if the old man was moving on, making room for his son, giving Frank the chance to thrive and show what he could do. She tried to be encouraging without being pushy, but she never thought Frank was going to be much of a success in the world’s terms. That was when she had her first affair. It was with the guy who delivered paper napkins and towels to the restaurant. It wasn’t that much fun. Frank was too busy and unobservant to notice. She could see herself sinking into an unexceptional though not uncomfortable life in which convenient, passionless little flings were going to be the major source of entertainment. It terrified her.
And then her whole life got turned around because she happened to take a snapshot of her baby son covered in coleslaw and trying to eat a chicken leg. Frank’s success with the Golden Boy chain was completely unexpected and yet she saw it as fulfilling some inevitable destiny, but hers not his. It was extraordinary to be married to the man behind the Golden Boy, but then she had always expected to be extraordinary.
Money meant that she didn’t have to work so hard at being a wife and mother. Money provided privacy and distance. Frank went away on business trips. Virgil went to camp and to music or riding or karate lessons. They lived in increasingly large houses where she was able to have rooms to herself, houses big enough that sometimes she would not even know where Frank and Virgil were. She had more territory and more time for her extraordinary self. She had known all along that it would be like this, that she would have the time and leisure to be mysterious and special and just a little dangerous. She was ready now.
She saw Virgil growing up, becoming rich and spoiled, becoming a dull womaniser. She refused to feel responsible. She was glad that he made a success of Trimalchio’s. She supposed it was a good thing. But she found it hard to feel any motherly pride just because her son had succeeded in satisfying the foody needs of a bunch of talentless fashion victims who hung around the restaurants of L.A. Liking Virgil was still too hard for her.
And Frank? Well, she had to be a little bit grateful to him. It was, after all, his money that was making her life possible. And no, she didn’t hate him, but she soon found him little more than comical. There was nothing special or mysterious or dangerous about him; a serious deficiency.
She said now to Leo, ‘And now he’s gone chasing after Virgil to discuss you and your activities, just like I knew he would. But the guy’s so dumb. He doesn’t even know whereabouts in England Virgil is, and it’s not as if Virgil ever had a worthwhile opinion on anything.’
‘Trimalchio’s wouldn’t be the same without Virgil,’ said Leo.
‘I don’t need you to defend my own flesh and blood to me, Leo.’
Leo had thought that maybe she did. He said, ‘I mean, I’m confused, I’m unhappy. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.’
He used a little-boy-lost tone that he should have learned by now would fail to impress Mary.
‘I feel so powerless,’ he added. ‘I don’t even know what I can do to help myself.’
‘I know that feeling, Leo.’
‘One of the things I guess we ought to do,’ he said, ‘is organise this surprise party, because if we don’t then Frank will know what we’ve really been doing.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ve been working on it.’
‘Really? Can I be involved?’ Leo liked parties.
‘You’ll be involved all right. I need you, Leo.’
‘How do you need me?’
Even as he said that, Leo was aware this was a question likely to provoke one of Mary’s more incomprehensible replies. She thought for a long time.
‘Oh Jesus, Leo, I’m so hungry. Hungry for kisses, for sensation.’
He wasn’t sure if she was serious or not. He kissed her.
‘And what kind of sensations are you hungry for?’ he asked.
He stroked her cool upper thigh. He did it slowly, effortlessly, and he had Mary trembling.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘for that kind of thing. The way to a woman’s heart, Leo … it’s a very indirect route … not through her stomach, not through her pussy either, though it’s definitely worth a try … shit.’
Leo started to make love to her. He towered above her like a chef over his chopping board, ingredients spread out before him. He kneaded soft morsels here and there, rolling items into shape, checking consistencies, tasting for flavour and seasoning. Mary felt herself melting, rising, blending.
‘That’s really nice, Leo. But you know what I really want.’
He did, from sweet experience. He withdrew. He lay down on his back. Mary brought her mouth down over his penis and provided a slow, teasing, expert blow job (not a thing Frank had ever had much of a taste for). But not too slow and not too teasing because Mary wanted her boy’s essence and she wanted it pretty damn soon.
Soon enough a glob of sperm hit the back of her throat. She didn’t swallow. She wanted to run it round her mouth for a while and taste all those flavours; oysters, rubber, salt, zinc, Leo. But mostly it tasted precisely of sperm. At last she swallowed, knowing that the flavour would be with her for the rest of the day. She felt less hungry than she had for some time.
‘You know, Leo,’ she said, ‘if Frank doesn’t appreciate your efforts in the kitchen, I know people who will.’